The government failed to account for the costs of IT when putting together its budget for the 2012 Olympic Games, according to the bean counter watchdogs of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
In its 39th report, the PAC said the Olympic Delivery Authority had neglected to include additional costs of £400m, which would cover " …

this sounds like a job for the BOFH

Typical.

and are now looking at "redesigning" the site to save costs and bring the bill down by some of the extra 7bn its jumped up by.

(7bn!! Golly! hey, thats my money!)

I remember an old Jack Dee sketch saying he was glad we did not get the Olympics in the 90's because we'd only f&ck it up and make it cheap and tacky. Think Timmy Mallet with a plastic bow and arrow lighting the flame - that kind of thing.

Another government project over budget?

Shoddy - why isn't there public uproar regarding this?

I vote we line up incompetent idiots that gave the job of costing "the games" to the incompetent idiots who employed some incompetent idiots to actually bring the idea of costing the games to reality, we then line up the incompetent idiots who were employed to actually cost "the games" and who employed the wholly unsuitable first year students to give them the answer.

Then we find and break the fingers of the person or persons who has simply rolled over and barked "yes" when every foreign and uk based building and maintenance company has sucked their teeth and trebled their cost due to "unforeseen" costings. Once their fingers are broken we push them to go and live in a housing estate apartment for a year and reduce his salary to minimum wage.

If I have some work done, I get a price and that's the price, why can't the money I give to the running of this shoddy country just use the same ethos! Instead of just playing games with gangs of quangos.

Err...

So, they forgot the IT. Twunts.

It appears that the government have a memory for IT not dissimilar to that of a strobe-lit goldfish. Maybe this is why we see the same companies making the same government IT projects screw up for the same reasons again and again and still get new contracts.

There was a time as well...

when this government could build things to spec, on time and on budget, I'm citing the original Crystal Palace as an example. In those days all you had were the engineers and the builders, none of the crap we have today that sits in between like the bureaucrats and the advisors and "outside contractors".

I think they've done a jolly good job, apart from forgetting the IT costs and the VAT

Cap the cost

If the building of a hospital can be capped, then the cost of the Olympics should be capped. They got it wrong once, came back and said that they had done their sums and it would cost £9,000,000,000 - they should not get a penny more.

Maybe not so forgetfull ....

I seem to remember that the bulk of the Manchester Commonwealth Games IT systems were 'sponsored' - ie the supplier (IBM I think) supplier most of the kit and infrastructure FOC so it could show off, and it was just the staff that Manchester paid for.

Can I also say I think the Games are a good thing - the regeneration of that part of London would never have happened without the Olympics, and the new infrastructure projects will kickstart plans that have been stuck in the pipeline for years. The only thing about this festival of sport that irks is that it won't do anything for the rest of the UK - but then again it was awarded to a city rather than a country.

Checklist

Don't forget this was done by Tessa 'Honestly, I've no clue who pays for my mortgage' Jowell, who managed to exclude the cost of potential overruns in the estimate, then forgot to include VAT and now we find out she didn't include any money for IT.

Doubts about 2012

"Judging by how successful the Wembley project was regarding delivery and budget it will be interesting to see the final bill for London2012."

Judging by the success of that project, I'd expect the construction for the London Olympics to be completed somewhere around 2015 - pretty much regardless of how much money they throw at it. I can't see the current management being able to get it finished anything like on time and the words "to budget" have already gone out the window.

I agree about the Idiot Race suggestion - we have a most deserving team in training for it.

So exactly WHAT was included?

So it didnt include Tax, or IT. Just wondering, there is actualy a budget to buy the medals isnt there? There is a budget to rent the various Stadii, and install broadcasting towers right? Oh, and is there enough money to pay the chef?

Get your tape measures out too.

Not many people realise that similar cost bungles led to the Sydney Olympics 100m track being only 96m long! The builders forgot a network cable trunk passed under the end of the track, so the timing system couldn't be put 100m from the startline. To move the other end of the track would have resulted in 4 rows of premium seating being lost, so the track was 96m. All true, according to the documentary 'The Games'.

But seriously - the London bid forgot the IT budget, but clearly remembered the logo budget, much to our great horror.

IBM again - anyone like OS2?

This really is a true story:

The Sydney Olympics were also provided with kit FOC from IBM - there were a *lot* of heavily used Thinkpads on the 2nd hand market after the games.

What was amusing was they also had to use IBM-provided software. The OS was OS2'Warp' which was being touted as a Windows-killer (hah!) and on top of that they ran Lotus Notes. In the end you would have to say things worked out OK in spite of the software, rather than 'because of'.